General

Amazon has rolled out a significant update for its digital assistant, Alexa. In order to make conversing easier, they’ve added the ability for users to ask follow up questions without necessarily having to repeat the trigger word, that is, Alexa. This update is aimed at making the interactive experience seem more natural. If you don’t already know, Alexa comes on all of Amazon’s Echo devices to enable communication between the device and its users. Until now, users would have to…

You probably use cloud storage in your daily life. You may use a Google Drive account to store your personal documents or your team at work may use a shared Microsoft OneDrive repository. The convenience of being able to access your files from virtually anywhere is something we’ve become dependent on in our personal and professional lives. But keeping track of all those files can quickly become unmanageable, especially if we don’t take the time to properly organize the files…

Theresa May’s China trade mission suggests closer surveillance links | Security | Techworld In surveillance, Britain and China have much more in common than people might realise. Share Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Google Plus British prime minister Theresa May recently led a trade mission along with 50 executives and university representatives to China to meet with president Xi Jinping and premier Li Keqiang. The stated purpose of the trip was to foster UK-China relations particularly focused on the post-Brexit landscape. When…

If laziness really is one of the virtues of a great programmer, then AWS Lambda is like a developer’s holy grail. With Lambda, you don’t have to spin up any servers, or configure or patch them, or pay for them to run hour after hour and week after week. You don’t even have to write much code. AWS Lambda is about getting the job done with least effort—and little cost. You write simple functions and wire them to a request…

Will future Soldiers be kitted up with a futuristic exoskeleton-style arm that will bring even more deadly, more powerful weapons into battle? The U.S. military has been pioneering lots of advances in exoskeletons – real-life versions of what you see Tony Stark wearing as Iron Man. By merging man with machine, exoskeletons have the potential to massively increase a warfighter’s firepower, strength, speed, endurance and much, much, more. Special Operations Command (SOCOM)’s Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit (TALOS) full body…

The Twitter account of upscale retailer Nordstrom confirmed this weekend that it did not “like” a tweet that claimed the “DS” in “Nintendo DS” stood for “dick suck.” Another twitter user had reported that the offensive remark appeared in their feed because Nordstrom liked it, but it appears now that this report was itself mistaken. “The DS in Nintendo DS stands for Dick Suck,” wrote Nick Wiger, a Twitter japester with 32k followers on the popular social network. “The idea…

The Pivot Table is a tool that Excel uses to create custom reports from your spreadsheet databases. Once you select the portion of your spreadsheet that contains the target data, then define it as a Table and name it, it becomes a Pivot Table, which is subject to all of the Pivot Table tools. With these tools, you can filter, sort, reorganize, calculate, and summarize one database Table or several Tables. You can extract specific information into a separate, custom…

A key executive behind Amazon Go, the online leader’s much heralded cashier-less grocery store, says she was surprised at how many customers were hesitant to just walk out the store. “What we didn’t necessarily expect was how many people would stop at the end on their first trip or two and ask, ‘Is it really OK if I just leave?’” said Gianna Puerini, vice president of Amazon Go, which opened in January in Seattle. That was one of the insights…

Image copyright Bret Fitzgerald Shares in the UK’s biggest technology firm, Micro Focus International, have plunged after it warned of a sharper than expected fall in revenues and its chief executive resigned. Shares in the company, whose customers include BMW and American Express, sank 55% to 849p in morning trading. The problems stem from its purchase of Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s software business for £6.8bn. Difficulties in integrating the business have hit revenues. Micro Focus specialises in extending the life of…

In other great physicist news, this is a short video of a guy blowing a vape cloud in front of an oncoming metro train (hereby known as Vapes On A Train) so we can all see the way the cloud is displaced as the train goes speeding by. It’s basically the same experiment conducted by this stud in front of a truck on a bridge, although I think his was actually the better example. Whatever the case, it’s just nice…